Ignited

by Lily Cahill

  How could she be a good daughter when she had these powers? Was it even possible?

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Henry

  The phone was down. Henry stared at its flayed innards and wondered if it would ever be back up again.

  None of the phones around town had been working, if the rumors and complaints Henry had heard the past few weeks were true. The phone on Mrs. McClure’s desk seemed to be on the fritz every other day. When she’d arrived that morning, she’d asked Henry to take a look at it if he had some down time during the day.

  He was positive that the fault was with the phone lines, not the phone itself, but he’d agreed all the same. Now, the phone’s guts were spread out over her desk, and she watched from a chair in the empty waiting room as he tinkered with some of the parts.

  Since opening at eight, Henry had only seen one patient: cranky Ms. Applebaum, who had been convinced she’d caught some sort of death-causing flu when, in fact, she had the regular flu. He’d even had time to call in at the Goodman’s home to check on Kenny’s knee.

  It was standard, with small practices like his grandfather’s, to vacillate between being very busy and very bored. Mostly, it was a good thing: periods without patients meant he had time to stay on top of all his paperwork and keep the office in tip-top shape. He could do things like look at the phone when Mrs. McClure asked. He frowned at one of the parts—the wire looked corroded. Maybe the phone was part of the problem.

  If no one was coming in, that meant they weren’t sick, and Henry was glad for that. He liked working in Independence Falls alongside his grandfather, and he’d been prepared for the lulls attached to such an atmosphere.

  What he had not been as prepared for was that something exciting would be happening, and for him to be kept on the outside of it. Nothing in medical school had prepared him for such a possibility. His coursework had not included Baffling Superhero Phenomena 101. It was strange and exciting, and an opportunity to study something he was not sure had ever been studied. He was dying to be involved.

  And his grandfather was nearly killing himself to keep Henry out of it.

  “Do you think we’ll need a new one?” Mrs. McClure interrupted his train of thought. She stood up and looked over his shoulder as he began to put the pieces of the phone back together.

  He didn’t know much about the mechanics of the phone, but Henry had always been good with his hands and quick to understand how things worked. Besides one faulty-looking wire, the phone seemed to be in good order.

  “I think it’s probably fine,” he told her. “I know you don’t want to hear it, but phone issues are a pretty common problem for everyone at the moment.”

  She sighed and shooed him away from her desk.

  There was a hacking cough from down the hall—the deep, throaty kind that came from fifty years of smoking combined with living in thin air. Both he and Mrs. McClure winced at the sound of it. Dr. Pinkerton was a good doctor. He had tended this town since he had first earned his medical license. There was no one in the world that Henry loved or respected more. The cough, however, worried him. There was only so much self-delusion that Henry could manage. His grandfather was not well, and yet he refused to relinquish the reins on his practice.

  Worry settled in Henry’s gut as he made his way back to his own office. He’d seen one patient this morning; his grandfather was on his fourth, and they were all follow-up appointments with the town superheroes. It didn’t make sense for the man to work himself so hard when Henry was right there and willing to help. And on this kind of problem, too, which was creating so much tension in town ….

  It didn’t help, of course, that he had not heard from Ruth Baker in nearly a week. He’d kept an eye out for her around town, but she had not made a single appearance that he was aware of. It was just worry, he told himself. He knew her father was a dangerous man, and that she was in a precarious situation. He was concerned for her health and well-being, and that was all.

  Also, he kind of wanted to know if she liked the fabrics, and if she’d made anything from them yet, and how she was doing, and if her father was always like that. He had so many questions for her. Although they had not spoken before that day in the general store, he found the girl was now always hovering around the edges of his mind.

  She was so pretty.

  Henry shook that thought away. With everything that was happening with the practice, the last thing he needed was to be thinking things like that. Even if he couldn’t really help it.

  Mrs. McClure popped her head into his office.

  “Thanks for your help with the phone,” she said, moving farther inside and leaning a hip against the door frame. “It was working perfectly this morning, otherwise I wouldn’t have bothered you.”

  “You’re never a bother, Mrs. M.”

  “Charmer.” She took in his office. “It’s neat as a pin in here. Productive morning?”

  Henry glanced around: everything was perfectly organized. The medical journals had been alphabetized and placed in careful piles next to his medical textbooks, lined up on the bookshelf in order by author’s last name. The patient files had been sorted and were waiting in the “out” box on his desk, notes made, diagnoses noted. His desk was the neatest thing in the whole office.

  He’d had some time to kill.

  Mrs. McClure raised her eyebrows at him. She crossed her arms in front of her. “You know, if you’re still bored, I have some files that need sorting.”

  Henry fought back a grimace. He hated sorting files. He’d completed eight years of schooling in order to avoid things like filing.

  Still, Dr. Pinkerton had not raised him to be someone who turned down a person asking for his help. He heaved a sigh and then said, “Show me the way.”

  He trotted along after Mrs. McClure, who surprised him by turning into his grandfather’s office. Dr. Pinkerton’s office was larger than Henry’s, but not by much. The building itself was small, and every inch of it was used as practically as possible. It was good to work with a man who was concerned with his patients first and his own comfort second.

  But Henry was not a regular visitor to his grandfather’s office—at least, not recently. Whenever Dr. Pinkerton had something to say, he tended to seek Henry out on Henry’s turf. In the months since Henry had returned to Independence Falls and begun working in the clinic, he had only been inside these particular four walls a handful of times.

  “Now these are the files for the people we’ve seen in the past few weeks. What with all that powers business ….” Mrs. McClure formed the words around a pinched mouth, shaking her head. “We’ve been busier than we’ve ever been, and neither your grandfather or I have been good about keeping up the regular office paperwork. We need the recent client files sorted alphabetically and stored in the credenza in the corner. Got it?”

  Henry nodded. She patted his cheek and ambled out of the room, leaving him alone.

  The files were everywhere. It looked like a records cabinet had exploded inside his grandfather’s office. The manila folders were pushed in piles up against the far wall, stacked on chairs and on top of the credenza. It was a madhouse. Henry didn’t understand how he’d become such a neat freak when raised by a man who kept his office looking like this.

  He moved around his grandfather’s desk, peeking beneath it to see if there were more files hiding there. The stack hardly surprised him, although it did irritate him. If Dr. Pinkerton was feeling so overworked that he couldn’t even keep his things straight, then why wasn’t he utilizing the services of the brand new doctor he had just hired? Henry was young, but that didn’t make him incompetent.

  He grumbled to himself as he got down on hands and knees to pull out the hidden files, and only succeeded in braining himself against the wood when he tried to crawl free. Papers from atop the desk fluttered down around him.

  He groaned. Still on his knees, he put the files onto his grandfather’s chair, and then began to gather up all the papers that had fallen d
own. Hopefully, Dr. Pinkerton was as disorganized as he looked, and he wouldn’t notice that everything was terribly out of order.

  A name on one of the papers caught his eye—Cora Murphy. In a different color pen, someone had added “Briggs” to the tail of her name. She’d been part of that fight, Henry had heard.

  He peeked over the top of the desk. The door was still open, showing a clear view out into the hallway. Mrs. McClure was back at her desk, he presumed. Patrice walked by with a patient, chatting nicely the whole way. His grandfather was safely ensconced in a consultation. No one would notice if he took a quick peek, and maybe he would have some sort of helpful insight.

  He flipped open the file and quickly skimmed the various reports inside. He skipped over the more basic information and went straight to the results of her last few follow-up examinations. His grandfather’s chicken scratch detailed a strange evening where she’d been sapped of all her energy and strength, as well as the subsequent tests done while she’d been in his care. The complete blood count look normal—her white blood cells had been high, but she’d been fighting whatever had affected her, so that made sense. Her red blood cell and platelet count both looked normal, and—Henry paused, frowned.

  There was something noted that made no sense, something that was only labeled as “BBC.” The numbers were comparable to her white blood cells, but he didn’t know what they meant.

  Henry put the file aside and picked up the next one, for Bo Erikson’s annual check up. It included all the notes on the routine physical, and nothing seemed out of place except for some high blood pressure, so he tossed that file away and picked up another one.

  It was Jan Clarkson.

  Jan had died during the days-long illness that had followed the mysterious fog. She’d been the only patient they’d lost, and it had been hard for Henry. Although he knew he couldn’t save every single person he saw, he still wanted to. He flipped directly to Jan’s blood test results, and once again saw that strange denotation—BBC. It was labeled like a blood cell, but that was ridiculous. There was no fourth blood cell.

  Jan’s white blood cell count had been off the charts—it looked like her body had attacked itself to death. The BBC numbers, whatever they meant, were nearly as high.

  Was this related to the fog? What did these strange numbers mean, and if Dr. Pinkerton was tracking them, what did he know that Henry didn’t?

  Henry grabbed a handful of files and stuffed them under his white lab coat just as Mrs. McClure popped her head back in. He tried and failed to strike a casual pose.

  Mrs. McClure smirked at him. “You ready for a patient, doctor?”

  Henry made his way down the hall to room three and grabbed the chart on the door, scanning it. He nearly groaned when he saw the name there: Mrs. Peggy Williams and her daughter, Helen. Mrs. Williams was a nervous first-time mother. For how often she stopped in to the clinic to have baby Helen checked for one disease or another, she may as well have moved in.

  As much as Henry loved his job and his hometown, Mrs. Williams was not his favorite patient. He could remember her as Peggy Statler back in high school, always getting into everyone’s business, gossiping, causing trouble. She’d promised Bill Goodman she’d go to the Mountain Pearl Dance with him when they were eighteen and had nearly broken the man’s heart when she showed up with Jack Williams instead.

  If she had been just another patient, he would have been happy to help with her first-baby nerves. But it was tough to be polite to Mrs. Williams, especially since she still acted like the same woman, even after all these years.

  It seemed Helen had been up all night screaming, and Mrs. Williams was concerned. He wasn’t sure how to explain to her that she shouldn’t expect her child to have a normal sleep schedule for several more months. He’d told her before, and that hadn’t made a difference in how often the woman came in.

  Knocking lightly at the door, Henry entered. “Mrs. Williams, how good to see—”

  “Finally!” Mrs. Williams said. Her blond hair was a frazzled mess, wild and disheveled. The baby in her arms whimpered as she rocked her back and forth. “This is the quietest she’s been in hours.”

  Henry fought back a sigh. “As I’ve explained to you before, Mrs. Williams, your daughter has colic. She is going to—”

  “Can’t you fix it?”

  “The only thing that can fix it is time, I’m afraid.” Sympathy tugged at Henry’s gut as Mrs. Williams slumped before him. She was never his most pleasant patient, but she had also never before seemed this unkempt. He took a step closer and reached his arms out for baby Helen, cradling the child on his shoulder. “Are you all right, Mrs. Williams? You don’t seem like yourself.”

  With the baby out of her arms, Mrs. Williams dropped her head into her hands. “No, I’m not all right. If I’m honest, I’m worried sick.”

  Helen stirred against his shoulder, and he made a soothing sound. “Worried about what?”

  “About what? Where have you been, doctor? About the people who have invaded our town, with their … magic powers!” Her voice was tinged with hysteria as she sat back in her chair, nervously patting her wild hair. “My husband is usually so good with Helen, so much better than I ever expected a man to be, but he’s been off all week at those meetings, trying to figure out what’s to be done, and I’m just—”

  “Meetings?” Henry interrupted. “What meetings?”

  Mrs. Williams stiffened and looked up at him through narrowed eyes. “You haven’t heard?”

  Henry shook his head. “I spend most of my days here. I miss things, sometimes.”

  That wasn’t actually true—there were few people who liked to gossip more than Mrs. McClure, but it was a handy excuse. Mrs. Williams nodded, as if it made perfect sense, and added, “Well, some of the men are worried about protecting us from those freaks. I mean, how can we possibly trust them, with what they can do? Why, it’s like having living, breathing weapons in our own town.” She shuddered. “They’ve met every night this week at the diner.”

  It was all Henry could do to continue rocking the baby slowly, carefully, as he mulled over what Mrs. Williams had just told him. It was the second time in just as many days that someone had mentioned feeling threatened, but he couldn’t imagine it. After all, the people who had been infected were not strangers—every person in Independence Falls had cause to speak to the Briggs brothers, at some point, and no one had ever had any reason to call them anything other than upstanding young men. June Powell was a sweet girl, as well, and Teddy Dickinson a fixture behind the bar. Henry had not lived in Independence Falls for years and still had nothing but fond memories of all of them.

  Yet Henry knew the power of suspicion. Just before the fight, hadn’t there nearly been a murder when a mob of people had attacked Ivan Sokolov?

  But that was a relatively small group of people. This … this was sweeping and sudden. Henry had to admit, it was nearly impossible to wrap one’s mind around this change to the town’s young people, especially because no one had as yet pinpointed the cause. But it wasn’t the kind of terrifying experience that required some sort of action committee be formed.

  Not unless they were planning something. Henry’s stomach turned to lead.

  Careful of Helen’s delicate neck, he swaddled the baby and handed her back to her mother. “Well, see if you can get Mr. Williams to take a night off from pot-stirring in order to give you a break.”

  Mrs. Williams frowned. “What does that mean?”

  “It means,” Henry said, shortly, “that you’ve known those people your entire life and have never once been given cause to doubt most of them, and what your husband is doing is probably causing the community more harm than good.”

  “Well, I never!” Mrs. Williams stood abruptly, shouldering her bag and hugging her child tight to her chest. “You ought to be ashamed!”

  “I disagree,” he told her retreating back. He watched her storm out of the room and down the hallway, leaving without answerin
g Mrs. McClure’s called good-bye.

  Bill Goodman put his glass back on the counter, empty. Without even being told, Teddy Dickinson picked it up and refilled it. The bar was quieter than usual. It seemed word had got out about Teddy’s abilities, and now people were avoiding him.

  The fact that Bill had picked the bar cheered Henry. Maybe he wouldn’t have to talk sense into the man, anyway.

  Bill nodded toward Henry, who was still nursing his first beer. “Top him off, too, will you, Teddy?”

  “Thanks, Bill,” Henry said, as a fresh beer landed in front of him.

  “Least I could do for helping Gail with Kenny’s knee. It’s healing real well, by the way.”

  Henry hadn’t doubted that it would, but it was still nice to hear. “How is Gail doing? She seemed upset when I saw her the other day.”

  Bill sighed, long and deep. Henry knew exactly what that sigh meant. Really, he knew most things about Bill. They’d been friends since the second grade and had even managed to keep in touch after Henry had moved to Denver for school. Bill had gone the other direction and worked as a plumber, but he did good work, and he had a beautiful family. And if Henry was right—and he was, he was sure of it—Bill was worried.

  He drained his drink again. Henry frowned. That was unusual. When Teddy tried to refill it, Bill waved him off.

  “She’s worried, you know? She’s out of her mind over everything that’s happened recently, the stuff with—with the powers.” Bill shook his head. “One of our neighbors has serious roof damage from that fight. She lost her husband last year, can’t afford to fix it, can’t fix it herself. It’s all a big mess.”

  “You’re not becoming one of those doomsday people who is out there meeting about ‘what’s to be done,’ are you?” Henry snorted into his drink at the thought. Bill was too level-headed for that kind of nonsense, too calm and ….

  Too quiet.

  He looked over. Bill wouldn’t meet his eyes, instead staring into his empty glass.